Bill Kristol - the eternal stupidity of the delusional mind

According to the New York Sun, William Kristol appeared on Fox News on Monday and called for a resolution authorizing force against Iran. Stupidity this acute verges on the delusional! The US is mired in two wars which it appears to be losing by slow and painful degrees. Its ability to project power on the ground is no longer taken seriously by anyone and Iran, with the lessons of Israeli and American airpower in Iraq in mind (Israel of course in 1981), has structured its nuclear program to resist air strikes. I mean seriously, does anyone at this point believe that the American intelligence establishment has an accurate idea of the location of Iran’s assets? This is the crowd who were blindsided by Pakistan’s nuclear test, India’s resumption of testing and North Korea’s progress to nuclear weapons and also gave W all that credible WMD intelligence.

A war resolution? Mr. Kristol, remove your head from the echo chamber. You’re just embarrassing yourself.

An unattractive mouth, chockfull of marbles

On August 31, Ann Coutler, the shrieking harpy of conservative America, was appearing on Fox News and complaining loudly about the film depicting the fictional assassination of W. Her interviewer rightly called her to account for her supposed “joke” a number of years ago: “The only issue is whether to impeach or assassinate."

The interviewer, Alan Colmes, said “So, Ann, I guess it's OK to joke about assassinating a president, but it's not OK to represent it in a dramatic presentation, right?” Ann’s response wins its points for stupidity through sheer incomprehensibility:

COLMES: I mean, you joke about assassinating Clinton, that's OK?

COULTER: It wasn't -- I -- OK, I will explain this to anyone who is incapable of reading --
COLMES: That was the joke you made.

COULTER: -- i.e. liberals. In my book, High Crimes and Misdemeanors, describing the entire history of impeachment, which we got from the British. I explained how we changed it here in America. In Britain, it was a criminal punishment. You would be -- one of the punishments was hanging. Here it was purely losing your office.

Stupid President Tricks - Part I

Our kick off purveyor of the painfully stupid just has to be the President of the United States! In his speech to the American Legion this week, W said: “The war we fight today is more than a military conflict; it is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century,” and went on to say “The security of the civilized world depends on victory in the war on terror, and that depends on victory in Iraq.”

Do I think this is stupid because I believe it to be untrue? No. Now I do think it’s untrue, but the reason I believe this to a stupid utterance is that either the President himself doesn’t believe it, or if he does, then he’s too stupid to know what he should be doing. Consider: if this really is “is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century,” and the “security of the civilized world depends on victory,” then why hasn’t the President introduced the draft, doubled the number of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and put the US on a real war footing?

The answer is simple. This speech is just a stupid attempt to shore up a failing policy with hyperbolic language and it was made with the cynical belief that his audience would be too stupid to notice. But we aren’t are we?

Welcome to my funhouse!

This modest little blog exists only to let me get my jollies by making mock of some of the unutterably stupid things said by the powerful and the punditry. As the title[1] suggests, sometimes, the stupidity of public utterances is so concentrated and corrosive, you can almost feel your brain burning from the contact. On occasion, to prevent this from being yet another place of unrelieved whining, I will also celebrate the anti-stupid – the things that surprise and delight me and give me hope for the future.

As time goes on certain folk like the current US president, his minions and controllers, Pat Robertson, Ann Coulter, Jerry Falwell, Hillary Clinton, George Allen,Tony Blair, Mahathir Mohamad, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Stephen Harper, Hugo Chavez, and Thabo Mbeki will come up again and again. We'll also be on the look-out for obscure but frequent utterers of idiocy like William Dembski and brining them to your notice. I’ll also be on the look out for the one hit wonders – those luckless few who become briefly notorious for saying something stupid in public, and those generally sensible public figures who occasionally drop a clanger.

Am I smug and self-righteous? You bet! It’s my motto. Come on and join the fun, because comments are welcome and if they are amusing or irritating enough, I may even answer them.


[1] Which I have of course ripped off from some wittier person whose name I do not know